Jon looked back up the path toward the distant sound of waves, then back at Alexis, who was standing some ten paces in the other direction. Alexis put her hands on her hips and breathed out her nose, waiting for him to answer.
After a moment, she rolled her eyes and started to turn the way she had started going. She heard Jon's footsteps shuffle through the dirt to catch up with her. "Done arguing with me?" she asked without turning her head.
"Yeah. You might have the right idea," he said, now walking beside her.
Alexis smirked haughtily. A breeze swept through the jungle, rustling the thick leaves of the surrounding trees and feeling refreshingly cool on her face. Her arms were a different story. They suddenly itched obnoxiously, feeling as though the wind was carrying a bunch of invisible feathers with it. She scratched her arms and suddenly stopped walking. The skin felt coarse. Like her legs did on days when she didn't shave. She looked at them and while they looked a little dirty (probably from the tree bark), nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
"Lexi?" Jon asked, stopping short too. "What is it?"
Alexis shook her head. "Nothing. That breeze just felt weird. And stop calling me Lexi. It's Alex."
"That's what your girlfriends call you," Jon said as they resumed walking. "I wanted something special. Don't you like having a pet name?"
"No, and I don't like the idea of being a pet, either." She shot him a look. She usually wasn't this direct. Plenty of her exes did stuff that peeved her. That's why they were exes. She was used to rolling with it until dumping them for someone "better." But knowing she and Jon were stuck together on this island for who knows how long was causing her irritation to fester.
Jon argued back and they started bickering until Jon clutched his stomach.
"Dammit. I'm getting a cramp. We haven't eaten since getting here."
Alexis silently cursed him. Now that he said it, she realized she'd been ignoring her own stomach. "Got a power bar in your jacket?"
"No. But, hey!" He pointed up. Alexis followed his finger to a few yellow-green clumps in the trees. "Bananas!"
"Wow. Amazing timing. Do they usually grow that high up?"
"Afraid of heights now?" Jon teased. Alexis elbowed him, which caused him to yelp a strange screech that made them both pause and look at each other. Jon put his hand over his mouth. "Y...you know my tender spots, all right," he said in a somewhat deflated tone.
"C'mon." Alexis walked up to the base of the tree. It was thinner than the one she climbed down. That made it easier to wrap her arms and legs around it and shuffle upward, but she was a little worried that her weight would break it. To her surprise, the tree stood perfectly firm the higher she climbed. When she reached the cluster of bananas that surrounded the trunk, she locked her legs together around the tree to support herself, then reached up to snap one off and peel it.
Somehow she was expecting the inner fruit of the banana to look a lot different from the ones she was used to. It was the same pale yellow as any banana she'd ever seen, and smelled delicious. Normally she didn't care for the sharper taste of a yet-to-ripen banana, but that hardly mattered at the moment. She practically inhaled the thing.
"Hey!" Jon called. "Can you drop a few down?"
"Climb your own tree!" Alexis scoffed with a half-full mouth. She plucked another one and started working on that, ignoring him.
Jon kicked the dirt in silent protest and then resigned himself to doing what he was told. He found another banana tree and mimicked Alexis' climbing technique. "Hey, this is easier than you made it look!" In no time, he was snacking on is own bunch of bananas.
Having found and secured food, Alexis' elation began bubbling up. She was growing increasingly confident in the security of her legs' hold on the tree trunk. The thick, grooved bark made it easy to "sit" on. "Hey, Jon! Check this out!" She leaned backward and swung her torso downward 180 degrees, feeling her back rest against the trunk. The jungle floor appeared below her, giving her a rush of vertigo. "Whoo-oo-oo!"
Jon looked at his giggling girlfriend, very confused. That didn't stop him from chomping down a third banana, though. "Uh, maybe you've had enough, banana-brain."
Alexis blew him a raspberry with her tongue and then did something truly impressive. Her arms grabbed the tree and her legs let go. She executed a vertical backwards somersault, flipping completely over and then hooked the tree with her legs again. Then she slid down the remaining few feet to the ground, where she planted her feet and spread her arms in triumph.
Jon's mouth was agape. He wanted to make fun of her childish, ridiculous, and totally dangerous stunt, but he was too impressed to utter a word. This wasn't recognized by Alexis, who frowned at his silence, arms akimbo, tapping her bare foot on the ground. Jon smiled awkwardly and clapped. He squinted down at her. Something was off about her arms.
"Just 'cuz you've got moves doesn't mean you have to show them off. What if you hurt yourself?"
"Oh, Jon, you're too kind," she retorted flatly.
Jon started climbing down... slowly and carefully. "I mean, it looks like you bruised up your arms doing that."
"I'm fine. I--" Alexis' words caught in her throat as she lifted her arms. They were way dirtier than before. No, that wasn't dirt at all. There were dark lines threaded all over her skin. "I... Whuh...?"
It was a thin bed of hair. Jon strode up to her. He touched her arms before she had even thought to. She felt the coarse, furlike hairs rub against her arm. The alien sensation caused her to skip backward and wrench her arms away from him.
They both looked at each other in shock. Then, as if having the same thought, they looked at Jon's arms. They were covered up by his jacket, but the backs of his hands were exposed, and they were as hairy as her arms.
Alexis' voice shook. "What the fuck is this?"
Jon furrowed his brow as he continued staring down at his hands. "Don't know. I... This..." He pulled up a sleeve and confirmed that the same thing that happened to Alex happened to him. "Something in those bananas?"
"Oh fuck..."
"C'mon, Lexi. We're getting out of here." He grabbed her hand and they began walking at a brisk pace, continuing to follow the path.
"D-don't call-- ah, fuck it." Alexis was too rattled to talk back this time.